Three Beta Readers

This should prove interesting. I now have three people reading APoS to give me feedback and check for typos. Past experience shows they each will fine something incorrect that the others do not or miss, and then will come making sense of it all. But I doubt I'll do that till after Labor Day. I want to decompress.

I haven't been able to focus on anything, yet. Not book or movie. No research into launching APoS once it's done. Didn't even send out agent queries. Just floated between Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Took a nap. Watched cat and dog videos. Avoidance stuff.

I'm unsure about joining Threads because I don't know that much about it, and to be honest I trust Zuckerberg about as much as I do Musk, which is not at all. I stick with Twitter for contacts with the Ukrainian crowd to see how their fight against Russia's terrorism is going, and to bitch at Biden for not sending F-16s and more Patriot batteries to help defend the country. I fear for Zelenskyy and wish Putin would just die, already. But he won't; he's one of those people who knows they'll go to hell once they're dead so is postponing it as much as possible.

On the shallow side of this, my favorite books were by Russian authors -- Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky -- and I can no longer appreciate them as much. This invasion has shown me Russia has always been a vicious, bloody, imperialistic force in the region, thanks to history being discussed by Ukrainian historians and scholars. I knew about the famine caused by Stalin, in the 20s and 30s, and how Ukraine fought the Nazis...and I knew about the war in Lithuania against the Bolsheviks just after WW1 thanks to Werner Schölndorff's Coup de Grâce, but that's about it.

Now I'm steeped in the horrors of Russia's subjugation of her neighbors, all to the glory of her own arrogant image, and I cannot view anything creative from there without that baggage.